Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

How often do developers want to edit the same file, at the same time, and have those updates occur in real-time?

I see this as a compelling feature for something targeting the use cases of, say Google Docs, where multiple people are contributing to an outline document or a business plan at the same time - but for code, I don't quite see the appeal.



> How often do developers want to edit the same file, at the same time, and have those updates occur in real-time?

That's a very specific example of collaboration. Remote work is exploding. What about, say, integrated, collaborative debugging or code review? Integrations with things like Slack?


I'm sure the folks at Zed know what they're doing, but this is already possible in multiple editors / IDEs. I'm excited to see how Zed innovates in this space.

Examples:

- VSCode Live Share https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share

- JetBrains IDEs Code With Me https://www.jetbrains.com/code-with-me

- Standalone https://www.coscreen.co https://duckly.com


There's also SubEthaEdit for macOS: https://subethaedit.net


Another one mentioned elsewhere in the thread: https://lapce.dev


I do this all the time. I use a tool that has 2 modes: turn-based and multicursor, the turn-based mode is signnificantly more annoying. Most of the time you just use it to highlight but it's also good to be able to help the other person with typos and comments, while they are focusing on the logic.


Do you never pair?


I do, and one person has control over the keyboard at a time. Hell on earth is two people making write operations at the same code buffer.


I don’t see why? Doing some refactoring you’ve decided to do and you can both go through the file at the same time refactoring different methods or whatever. What’s the issue?


We do this frequently :) It's awesome to get through tedious tasks twice as fast




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: